Tui Airways will cancel six flights per day at Manchester Airport until the end of June. The airline said in a statement: “We would like to apologise to our customers who have experienced flight disruption in recent days and understand that they have been looking forward to these holidays for a long time.
“The May half-term holidays are always an incredibly busy period with many customers looking to get away, and this year is no different.
“Unfortunately, due to ongoing challenges in our operation, we have had to announce a small number of planned cancellations between now and 30 June from Manchester Airport only.
“We are directly contacting all impacted customers in departure date order and they will automatically receive a full refund.
“We can reassure our customers that the remainder of our flying programme is expected to operate as planned. We’d like to apologise again for the inconvenience caused and we thank customers for their understanding and patience during this time.”
Transport minister Andrew Stephenson has said the Government is working with the airports to minimise the disruption to travellers but that it was up to the operators to ensure they had enough staff to deal with the flow of passengers.
“We are working with aviation sector in order to ensure that the queues we have seen at the airports are minimised and that disruption is minimised,” he told Sky News.
“It is for the airports to plan and recruit enough people in order to deal with the significant increases in people flying which we have been expecting for some time.
“We have used are Brexit freedoms in order to ensure that things like security clearances can be done quicker and some of the training can actually begin before full security clearance is granted.
“I hope that the disruption that we are seeing is short term.
“We want to get people back flying again.”
Shadow financial secretary to the Treasury James Murray argued that the “Government didn’t step up and now people are seeing the impact of that as people’s holidays are impacted”.
The Labour MP told Sky News: “It felt fairly obvious what was happening during the pandemic in that people were not travelling, were not flying throughout the pandemic, but then, once the pandemic starts to recede, air travel would start to pick up again and the Government simply didn’t do what was necessary during the pandemic to get ready for what’s happening now, and now we’re seeing the impact of it.”
He added: “The other aspect of this as well, and not to forget, is all of the chaos in terms of passports and the fact that that was predictable as well… It’s something where a bit of common sense, a bit of planning… if the Government had had their mind focused on what was coming they could have prepared for this.”
The chief executive of the Airline Management Group has said it is no surprise that travel demand increased around the Jubilee bank holiday.
Peter Davies told LBC: “Well, in the airline industry we often refer to Swiss cheese, and whether the holes line up, and often there are many holes to line up.
“On this occasion there’s only two or three.
“It’s down to mismanagement, in my opinion, between the airlines and the airports.
“I think it’s natural for people to go away on holiday. It’s not a surprise that hotter weeks tend to be particularly busy – particularly in Jubilee week – and the fact we’ve been cooped up for a couple of years.
“So there was no surprise there that people would flock back and fly. Indeed, the bookings have been increasing for many months now. So it comes as no surprise.”
The aviation sector is reluctant to “gear up” for thousands of people arriving because of the increased costs, the chief executive of the Airline Management Group has said.
Asked what the industry can do to cope with demand, Peter Davies told LBC: “Well, they have to gear up as quickly as possible in terms of staff, particularly through the airports with security.”
However, he said they are often reluctant to do so.
“I arrived back in the UK a couple of weeks ago at Terminal 2 at Heathrow and had to wait 56 minutes to get through the electronic pass gates,” he said.
“It was a snake, which is a good way of moving people around.
“It was moving, but the issue was of course that, once you’ve got to the electronic gates, very few people are being turned away, perhaps 10% because their passport was wrong or something, but all the gates there were open.
“It wasn’t as if you only had two or three – you had, I think, about 20 gates.
“So, when you’ve got thousands of people arriving at Heathrow at seven o’clock in the morning, and that’s been happening for years, where you got a lot of people arriving on overnight flights, then you should gear yourself up to make sure you can handle those people.
“But of course that costs money and it costs space, and people are reluctant often to do that.”
Minister for Arts Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay acknowledged cancelled flights and long queues at UK airports were “causing a lot of distress for people particularly in half-term”.
Asked about Government action over the airport disruption, he told Sky News: “Colleagues in the Department for Transport are working with the industry, we have been for months urging them to make sure they’ve got enough staff so that thanks to the success of the vaccine rollout, as people are able to travel again, that people can take the holidays that they’ve missed and that they’ve deserved and of course it’s causing a lot of distress for people particularly in half-term, people with family and children with them.
“It’s very distressing if you turn up at the airport and your flight isn’t ready, so we’ve been saying to the industry that they need to prepare for this, they need to have the staff that they need to make sure people can get away and enjoy holidays.”
He added: “We’ve been using some of our post-Brexit freedoms to make sure that people can be hired more quickly, but this is something the industry, some of the regulations can be met, but be met speedily, but we’ve been saying to the industry for quite some time, they should have been preparing for this.”
